A key piece of a validity argument for a language assessment tool is clear overlap between assessment tasks and the target language use (TLU) domain (i.e., the domain description inference). The TOEFL 2000 Spoken and Written Academic Language (T2K‐SWAL) corpus, which represents a variety of academic registers and disciplines in traditional learning environments (e.g., lectures, office hours, textbooks, course packs), has served as an important foundation for the TOEFL iBT® test's domain description inference for more than 15 years. There are, however, signs that the characteristics of the registers that students encounter may be changing. Increasingly, typical university courses include technology‐mediated learning environments (TMLEs), such as those represented by course management software and other online educational tools. To ensure that the characteristics of TOEFL iBT test tasks continue to align with the TLU domain, it is important to analyze the registers that are typically encountered in TMLEs. In this study, we address this issue by collecting a relatively large (4.5 million words) corpus of spoken and written TMLE registers across the six primary disciplines represented in T2K‐SWAL. This corpus was subsequently tagged for a wide variety of linguistic features, and a multidimensional analysis was conducted to compare and contrast written and spoken language in TMLE and T2K‐SWAL. The results indicate that although some similarities exist across spoken and written texts in traditional learning environments and TMLEs, language use also differs across learning environments (and modes) with regard to key linguistic dimensions.
In the realm of language proficiency assessments, the domain description inference and the extrapolation inference are key components of a validity argument. Biber et al.’s description of the lexicogrammatical features of the spoken and written registers in the T2K-SWAL corpus has served as support for the TOEFL iBT test’s domain description and extrapolation inferences. In the time since the T2K-SWAL corpus was collected, however, university learning environments have increasingly become technology-mediated. Accordingly, any description of the linguistic features of university language should account for the language produced in technology-mediated learning environments (TMLEs) in addition to non-technology-mediated learning environments (non-TMLEs). Kyle et al. recently began to address this issue by collecting a corpus of TMLE language use, which they then compared to language use in non-TMLEs using multidimensional analysis (MDA). The results indicated both similarities and substantive differences across the learning environments, but the study did not investigate the effects of particular registers on these results. In this study, we build on previous research by investigating lexicogrammatical features of specific spoken and written registers across technology-mediated and non-technology-mediated learning environments.
This paper investigates how an English as a second language (ESL) teacher manages student embarrassment in the adult ESL classroom. Data consist of approximately 4 hours of video-recorded classroom interactions at a low-intermediate adult ESL class in the United States. Participants include a female teacher and eight adult English learners of various L1 backgrounds. Using conversation analysis, this paper describes several ways in which the teacher orients to potential displays of student embarrassment during classroom interactions: (1) excusing the failure and inviting peer support, (2) excusing the failure and providing a factual account, and (3) attributing the failure to creativity. The findings of this study contribute to the growing literature on contingency in teacher talk (e.g. Waring, 2016;Waring, Reddington, & Tadic, 2016) by identifying a set of teaching practices teachers can use to remediate student embarrassment. The study also contributes to the limited literature on embarrassment in interaction (e.g. Heath, 1988;Sandlund, 2004) by examining the sequential environments of embarrassment in the adult ESL classroom, the characteristics of and orientations to embarrassment, and how such sequences are made relevant by the participants in classroom talk-in-interaction.
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